Word: shannon
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...Author William Shannon, able columnist for the liberal New York Post, this casual naturalization represents the Irish contribution to America: a concern for people, and a comparable disregard for the niceties of law. Where the Irish have failed in America, writes Shannon, it has been a failure not of nerve but of knowledge...
Instinct for Power. Shannon, 36, is himself a first-generation American; his father, a carpenter, immigrated from Ireland in 1910, settling in Worcester, Mass. As Shannon sees it, the Irish developed a sophistication in politics through their long struggle against their British overlords. Their favorite maxim: "It is better to know the judge than to know the law." In the U.S., they built the political machines that would eventually govern many cities, and they instructed later immigrants in their intricacies. "For the Irish," writes Shannon, "politics was a functioning system of power and not an exercise in moral judgment...
...Irish performed less brilliantly in other areas of American life. A practicing Catholic, Shannon nevertheless blames the Irish Catholic clergy for most Irish shortcomings in the U.S. The clergy were too busy building the church to bother about intellectual pursuits, and warned their congregations not to mix with the Protestant population. "The conservatives of the church," writes Shannon, "struggled to ensnare and pinion the live corpus of the faithful in their own petty vision, a vision of a claustral parish world: tidy, thick-curtained, breathing of dust, every antimacassar firmly in place...
Coming of Age. But there has always existed a countervailing, more enlightened element in the Irish community, writes Shannon. The list ranges from James Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore, who in the 1880s urged lay Catholics to join trade unions, to Al Smith, the ebullient Governor of New York, on to the liberal priest John Ryan, who was Father Coughlin's most persistent Catholic critic...
...Shannon's view, the best of the Irish came to flower in the person of John F. Kennedy: "the poetry, the power and the liberalism." Writes Shannon...